Digital Interactif

5 Ways to Monetize Your Web Content

I went to a few of the Podcamp Boston 2007 sessions on Saturday afternoon and I was surprised to see how much of the crowd was not into Podcasting.  When asked for a show of hands, it seemed the majority of folks there were active bloggers but did not actually post original audio or video on their blogs.  Though the economics of blogging is not one-to-one with podcasting, the conference offered up some insights into monetizing online content. 

Paul Kontonis, CEO/Founder of For Your Imagination, gave an interesting presentation entitled Monetizing Your Web Series/Podcast.  For Your Imagination (FYI) is a video production company that creates original and professional quality content.  Since it's founding in November 2006, FYI has spent $700,000 and earned $400,000 from its various means of monetization.  Though FYI is currently losing money, the IPTV market is looking at considerable growth over the next several years as consumers have begun to adapt to the idea of watching TV shows online. 

Paul's presentation addressed the ways in which his company has attempted to monetize its video content/audience and I have summarized the findings below:

1. Advertising
   • Banner Ads
     • Average CTR (Click-thru-Rate) for a flash banner ad located at the top of a webpage is only .25-.3%  Very much due to the Banner Blindness affect.
     • Interestingly, Feedburner ads on an RSS feed have an average of 3-4% CTR and therefore, banner ads could be leveraged better if placed primarily within feeds. 
     • Banner ads yield an average of $1 - $2 eCRM (Ad revenue generated by 1000 actual click-thrus on an ad) for a general web audience.  Niche markets can fetch higher eCRM (ex. $23 for the Business School audience: 26-33 year old, college educated, finance background).
   • Video Ads
     • Stand alone video ads yield an average eCRM of $2 - $3   
2. Sponsorship
   • To make money on sponsorship, a web property must either have a massive audience(200,000+ unique visitors/month) or a good size niche audience (50,000+ for potential Business School candidates).   
   • Product/Company sponsorship typically pays $40 - $120 eCRM. 
3. Merchandise
   • .1% of For Your Information visitors actually buy the site's branded merchandise.  For instance, Patrice O'neals Web Show has sold 70 pairs of branded panties! The average customer purchases $4 worth of merchandise off the site.
   • Resources for creating Branded merchandise: Cafepress, zazzle, and CreateSpace.
     • Ideas for Products: DVD's, Tshirts, Posters, Buttons, Thongs, Buttons, Coffee, Mugs, ect...
   • Set up an Amazon affiliate program.  Visitors will be more likely to buy your merchandise if they associate your brand with a reputable online merchant.
4. Licensing
   • Since FYI is a video production company, the figures they provided do not correlate to blogging.
   • $2k - $5k per episode should a web show be picked up by Showtime, HBO, or another major cable channel. 
5. Franchising
   • Deals for a cable channel buying the right to your video content can range from $250k - $5 million.

For more information on the Monetizing Your Web Series/Podcast presentation, check out Lori Magno's write up.   

Free Web Analytics Software

I've been keeping up this blog for over two months now and I figured I'd devote a little time to the various FREE Web Analytics programs that I have used: StatCounter, Google Analytics, Clicktale, Feedburner, FeedJit, and Typepad's internal counter.

StatCounter - Good for Bloggers
This tracking software provides free info on 500 page views per month.  I signed up for Statcounter and it has become my tracker of choice.  I have noticed some small issues with it though, such as not accurately recording 'length of visit' statistics, but overall it is the easiest to use.   Obviously, 500 page views per month is not a lot but I only average 15 unique visitors per day so it is not an issue for me.  If I were to ever generate a significant amount of traffic, I would consider paying for this service. 
Cool Features: Real time tracking, download your stats to excel, great keyword analysis, tracks return ing visitors by IP address and details visit history. 

Google Analytics - Good for Small Businesses
Google Analytics is a must have for users of Gmail because it requires no additional registration.  The service provides unlimited counts for page views and unique visitors.  The dashboard is designed well and utilizes charts and graphs for all metrics.  Though it provides a compehensive service I find it annoying that the service also does not provide real-time metrics, for instance you can only see today's data tomorrow(this does not bode well for the compulisive stat tracking bloggers).  There also appears to be a flaw with the 'visit length' feature for Google Analytics just as with Statcounter.  Both services show anything under 1 minute as 00:00.  As a reader of blogs, I personally do not pour over every word that is posted but skim for content, ideas, and links.  Therefore, I would expect most readers of blogs to be similar and not stick around very long once having seen one of my posts.   But why can't Google Analytics record this?  The difference between :05 and :55 is huge and Google deserves a slap for such a major oversight.
Cool Features:  Excellent charts, create conversion goals(i.e. entering order flow, getting to 'Thank you' page, clicking on a specific link, ect.).

Clicktale - Good for Creepshows
This is quite possible the scariest/stalkerish/creepiest/most interesting tracking software I have come across.   Clicktale creates a movie file that records the movements of a site's visitors.  It shows how someone scrolls down the screen and even where their mouse is at all times.  The main benefit I have gained from this software is that it accurately records visitor length whereas all of the other services do not.  I have found that the 00:00 length visits are more like :25 to :40 which makes me feel better/less irrelevant.  Clicktale is definitly a "see it to believe it" program and I recommend checking it out.  The tracking program tracks 100 page views/week and if you need more you must pay for the service.  FYI, I don't watch the recordings, it got old real fast and quite frankly I find it disturbing that people can track your online movements so closely.  I'd like to know how to avoid being tracked by such software, so if you have any tips, please share them in the comments. 

Feedburner - Good for Bloggers/Content Producers
This tracking code examines how many people subscribe to your RSS feed as well as how many people click through their reader to go to your site.  This is a nice suppliment to the typical tracking software and gives you a better understanding of how people read your blog and which posts are relevant to the people who bother to keep up-to-date with your posts.  Additionally, the Feedburner service was bought out by Google a few months ago and now the service is free(pre-Google you had to pay for it!).
Cool Features: Provides glimps of RSS stats.

FeedJit - Good for Bloggers
FeedJit is the widget in the top right corner of this blog that tracks real time activity on a blog.  I think this is a cool feature, but I wish it provided more in depth info for visitors to this site such as when people arrived, are they still on the site, how many total uniques, who is a returning visitor, ect.  I don't have much more to say about the widget.  As a reader of this site, what do you think?   Do you even want to see stats?

Typepad
I initially chose to pay $8.95/month for the typepad service because it came with tracking software.  Unfortunately, the tracking software is terrible.  It only records page views (not unique visitors) and it gives you no additional information aside from point of entry(i.e. keywords used to find the blog and incoming link).  Typepad does not provide real-time info like Statcounter but it's lag is only a couple of minutes.  All in all, the typepad tracking service is bad and definitly not worth $8.95 a month.  But honestly, until Typepad does me wrong, I'll stick with their mediocre service.

If you use Typepad, I can help you get the software mentioned above onto your site if you are having trouble.  Just drop me a line and I'll be happy to help.  As for the rest of you, sorry if you are creeped out by how much people can track you online, but it's the truth.    

Found in the Blogosphere

A recent post by Rocket Kids alerted me to an article in today's Boston Glove, Lost in the Blogospere by Sven Birkerts, on literature in the blogosphere and whether it is different from traditional literature:

The blogosphere, I would argue, works in the opposite direction. There are arbiters aplenty -- some of the smartest print writers are active on blogs as well -- but the very nature of the blogosphere is proliferation and dispersal; it is centrifugal and represents a fundamental reversal of the norms of print culture.

Proliferation -- the chaos of the endlessly branching paths -- is one crucial structural difference between the print and digital realms. Never mind that the Web has swallowed vast archives of print material; we are also seeing a significant shift in the nature of the discourse itself. Blogs and on-line journals do not simply transfer old wine into new bottles -- the wine itself is changing.

Sven ("I am in every way a man of print, shaped by its biases and hierarchies, tinged by its not-so-buried elitist premises.") Birkerts accurately sees the Internet triggering a paradigm shift within the literary world.  But he is incorrectly attributing this shift to the conversation. 

The conversation in literature has always been wide and drifting, just take a look at the endnotes/footnotes of a literary critique.  The only difference is that if you want to follow up on an endnote found in print, then you must locate the book that is being referred to.  Blogs simply reduce the time needed to connect ideas together.  Yes, this is a major change but I would argue that a change in the speed of a conversation is not in itself a paradigm shift. 

The real paradigm shift, as I see it, is taking place in the diffusion of literature.  Daily Lit is a great example of the way that the internet will change literature.  Daily Lit is tearing down the walls of the castle.  The publishers, reviewers, and critics who once served as the gate keepers in the industry will no longer have the ability to limit a person's ability to distribute their work.  New novelists can distribute their books through RSS to great numbers of readers in a formal, non-blogosphere, manner.  Add a banner advertisment to each post on the RSS feed and you'll have a profitable site with none of the traditional costs of a publishing house.  Prepare to see more "Daily Lits" pop up in the years to come.

Additionally, sites such as Good Reads provide a forum for people to review books and share opinions with friends and other readers.  Personally, I would trust the opinion of 300 people over the opinion of Sven Birkerts and thus Good Reads works well for me.

Sven shouldn't be so scared of becoming irrelevant.  Literature in the blogosphere isn't changing the nature of literature itself.  There will always be  a market for professional/academic reviewers and critics.  The only real change taking place is the means in which literature and opinions are proliferated. 

Books Delivered via Email

Daily Lit is a service that will email you books or serve them up to you through an RSS feed reader.  You decide how frequently the chapter/excerpts are sent to you in order to work out a reading regiment suited to your schedule/life.

There is a nice selection of Charles Dickens books: Going Into Society(6 parts), Hard Times(130 parts), A Tale of Two Cities(170 parts), A Christmas Carol (30 parts), Bleak House(440 parts), David Copperfield(447 parts), ect...

There is also a great selection of non-fiction books such as The Crisis(Churchill), Dream Psychology(Freud), On the Origin of the Species(Darwin), The Prince(Machiavelli), ect...

  Here's a sampling of some of the updates that Daily Lit has made according to most recent Daily Lit Blog posting:

• Voracious readers can now receive longer emails or longer feed updates.
• Idiosyncratic readers can now choose any combination of days (e.g. only Wednesdays, or Monday and Thursday).
• Migrating readers can now change their email address.
• Waiting readers can now find out which books have been added via RSS.

Making the length of the excerpt customizable is a fantastic idea.  While the creators have done a great job, here are my suggestions for the site:

• There isn't a rating system for the books (An ideal rating system that comes to mind is Goodreads). 
• The site currently has forums where users can communicate with each other and discuss the books, but the whole 'forum' thing is very Web 1.0.  Where are the "Friends" and "Groups"? 
• When other users reply to one of my comments in a forum, I want to be sent an alert (preferably through RSS) that let's me know. 
• I also want to be able to follow forums via RSS. 

Rockin site.  I look forward to getting my lit on. 

And by the way, if you don't use an RSS feed reader, now would be a good time to start.  Personally, I use Google Reader to keep track of RSS feeds.  It's really easy to use and if you already have a gmail account, you just have to sign in as oppossed to creating a new account.

American Idol for Blogs

A french site, '30 minutes of glory' displays your blog for 30 minutes, people vote for their favorite blog, and I suspect it generates a crazy amount of traffic for your site.

What's interesting about the site is that to be the blog selected, all you have to do is be the first person to load your blog's URL into the form field in the title banner. 

The form field doesn't appear until the clock has stopped ticking though, so you probably won't see it when you first get to the page. 

I love this idea! A large Brand name, such as Coca-cola, could do something like this and host the blogs of individuals in a widget/sitelet on their main website property.  Not only would this gain a lot of traffic for Coca-cola, but it would also create value for Coca-cola website users. 

Say you just love CocaCola but you never go to their website.   Coca-cola could host a widget/sitelet on their main page that would do exactly what this site does: a) promote a blog and b)let people vote and rank the blogs they appreciate.  Bloggers would go to CocaCola in an attempt to promote their blog, thus increasing traffic to CocaCola's web properties, and as more and more people use the site the traffic generating affect for bloggers will become greater and greater.

It's a marketer's dream...though the legal issues surrounding the content posted on the widget/sitlet are a whole 'nother ballgame. 

xfruits.com

xfruits is a French website, conveniently translated into English, that provides a host of RSS tools for you blog.  xfruits gives you a profile and has a some cool additional functionality. 

RSS to MY BLOG is the newest function to be added to the site.  This automatically reads your blog and syndicates it.

EMAIL to RSS allows you to email blog posts to your website by email. 

I've just started using the site, so if you know anything more about it, drop me a line.  It'll be producing some cool RSS features in the future.